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It’s interesting to me how many people are upset that other people, including American citizens, are expressing enthusiasm for teams other than the U.S. in World Cup soccer play.

For one thing, it’s interesting because the U.S. is out of it. I mean, why pull for a team that already has lost?

For another, in strictly my own personal observation — your mileage may indeed vary — the kind of cheerleading that seems to evoke this criticism isn’t for, say, England or Ireland or New Zealand or even Italy. It’s for countries from the world’s equatorial regions, like Brazil or Nigeria. You know — the ones full of scary brown people.

Could you be a little less subtle?

And if you’ve ever worn anything green on St. Patrick’s Day, let alone marched in a St. Patrick’s Day parade and gotten knee-walking drunk, and you’re not actually an Irish immigrant or first-generation Irish-American, you need to shut the hell up.

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… to the Minnesota Nurses Association. I do not know why WordPress automatically created a link from your blog — which, I gather, is a key communications element during a very tense time in labor negotiations for y’all — to my blog in general (I was a medical reporter once, but that was a while ago), let alone to a post about International Talk Like a Pirate Day, which is still a few months off. Maybe WordPress thinks one side or the other in your dispute is pirates.

Anyway, I thank all of you for your visits, and I hope that somewhere amid all the political screeds, snark, cute things my kids say and disturbing disquisitions on the dietary habits of reptiles, you’ve found some worthwhile content. And if not, well, I understand.

I’m grateful to both Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters for something: They admitted, yes, the media are liberal, and a good thing, too. It has to be that way, they said. For — and this is Walters talking — journalism involves the “human condition,” and liberals care about the human condition. Unlike conservatives, who of course couldn’t give a rat’s a** about the human condition.

Anyway . . . Conservatives should be frank and bold when it comes to the media, as to everything else. And if others say you’re tiresome or whiny or uncool . . . well, so be it. Did you sign up for conservatism to be cool?

No, jackass, I signed up for conservatism to defend the Constitution. You should try it.

You see, Jay, they’re not cheering for the Democratic Party per se, for the most part. (And in the context of the past decade, even if they were, that would hardly be the worst sin they could be committing.) No, they’re cheering for anyone — God, anyone, even someone as sleazy as Robert “Pork Barrel” Byrd or as cardboard-spined and duplicitous as Barack Obama — who will stop the wholesale destruction of the Constitution and American values wrought by so-called conservatives in the past decade.

And while it’s always dangerous to generalize about a political movement, I speak as a registered Red State Republican for the past 32 years when I say that the evidence that today’s Washington Republicans don’t give a rat’s ass about the human condition is overwhelming. From mishandling Katrina to bailing out banksters while working families lose their homes, from defending torture to cutting off unemployment benefits, from lying us into a war to lying to the Ground Zero rescue/recovery workers about the hazards of their environment, from defending unconstitutional wiretapping to trying to destroy Social Security, the “I Got Mine, F— You” crowd infests the corpse of the American conservative movement and, by acting in this fashion while proclaiming itself Christian, dares God Almighty to strike its members down for blasphemy.

If the worst thing that American journalists are doing to Sarah Palin is saying mean things about her when they don’t know the microphones are on, they ought to be fired — not for bias, but for negligence. For in any politically and spiritually healthy — even sane — culture, anyone as both stupid and insane as Sarah Palin would not have been allowed anywhere near the levers of power, and anyone defending the idea that she should be would be shunned.

Journalists wouldn’t just be flies on the wall reporting on the charge — and, oh, God, offering us their oh-so-precious and oh-so-totally misguided perspective on it on the Sunday-morning talk shows — they’d be providing the intellectual torches and pitchforks.

And tools of the oligarchy like Jay Nordlinger couldn’t find employment writing copy for spam sites for a penny a word.

The Alaska Distillery in Wasilla just recently launched its Smoked SalmonFlavored Vodka, about a year after the Seattle-based Black Rock Spirits introduced a bacon-flavored vodka.

Both savory spirits were intended to complement Bloody Marys, but are finding wider uses among mixologists.

“I think there was some madness and some drunkenness involved, honestly,” said Toby Foster, an Alaska Distillery partner and the one charged with coming up with new flavors with Alaska themes. …

The key to the newest vodka’s flavor is how they smoke the salmon, and that’s a trade secret.

Once the fish is smoked, the skin is removed and employees masticate the fillets.

According to my dictionary, “masticate” means “chew” (which I’m guessing the Associated Press didn’t know or else any competent editor would have placed that detail MUCH higher in the story). I’m all about salmon (and bacon), but damn if I’m going to drink any vodka that has already been in someone else’s mouth. *shudders*

Like this:

Rhonda Dannenberg, a suburban mother of three, stuck her nose in six glasses of beer at the MillerCoors brewery here and swished a bit of each in her mouth. Then she delivered the kind of frank verdict that’s shaking up the mens-club world of beer tasting.

“I got a strong bruised fruit,” Ms. Dannenberg, 36 years old, said of one of the Miller Lite batches, drawing a few nods from the three other women and two men at the table. “Slight cardboard taste. Oxidized. Unacceptable.”

At many companies, the assembled panelists would have been men, typically brew masters and other technical types. And it makes sense. To judge from TV commercials, men like beer better than women do and sometimes even seem to like beer more than they like women.

But the British company SABMiller PLC decided several years ago to reach deeper into its employee pool to find adept tasters, inviting marketers, secretaries and others to try their hand. The company concluded that women were drinking men under the table.

“We have found that females often are more sensitive about the levels of flavor in beer,” says Barry Axcell, SABMiller’s chief brewer. Women trained as tasters outshine their male counterparts, he says.

If practice makes perfect, men should have the clear edge in beer tasting, since they account for 72.8% of the world’s beer sales, according to market-research firm Datamonitor Group. But SABMiller, which makes Pilsner Urquell, Peroni and Grolsch in addition to Miller and Coors brands, says its empirical evidence shows that females are the superior sex when it comes to detecting such undesirable chemicals as 3-methyl-2-butene-1-thiol, which makes beer “skunky.”

Y’know, I sort of kind of generally know what I like in terms of how different beers taste, but I can’t swear to you I could pick my “favorite” out in any kind of blind taste test. (I’ve been to maybe a dozen wine tastings in my life, which is a dozen more than the beer tastings I’ve been to. Go figure.) So it’s good to know that the ladies of SABMiller PLC have got my back, cervisially* speaking.

*cervisially (adv.): in a way or manner of or pertaining to beer, from L. “cervisa,” beer. Now don’t say you never learned anything here.

Like this:

Cincinnati Bengals receiver Chris Henry suffered from a chronic brain injury that may have influenced his mental state and behavior before he died last winter, West Virginia University researchers said Monday.

The doctors had done a microscopic tissue analysis of Henry’s brain that showed he suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

Neurosurgeon Julian Bailes and California medical examiner Bennet Omalu, co-directors of the Brain Injury Research Institute at WVU, announced their findings alongside Henry’s mother, Carolyn Henry Glaspy, who called it a “big shock” because she knew nothing about her 26-year-old son’s underlying condition or the disease.

Henry died in December, a day after he came out of the back of a pickup truck his fiancee was driving near their home in Charlotte, N.C. It’s unclear whether Henry jumped or fell. Toxicology tests found no alcohol in his system, and an autopsy concluded he died of numerous head injuries, including a fractured skull and brain hemorrhaging.

But Bailes, team doctor for the Mountaineers and a former Pittsburgh Steelers physician, said it’s easy to distinguish those acute traumatic injuries from the underlying condition he and Omalu found when staining tiny slices of Henry’s brain.

I’ve written a couple of times about the growing body of research into long-term brain damage caused by contact in football. (Researcher Omalu is also quoted in the GQ article linked in that second post.) In Chris Henry’s case, it’s important to distinguish what we know from what we don’t: specifically, whether his erratic behavior was caused by the underlying long-term brain damage or not.

And as I’ve said before, a reckoning is coming for organized football at all levels but particularly the college and pro games and their fans, me included. Depending on what additional research reveals, this kind of brain damage, which may be simply the normal consequence of routine contact in college and pro ball, could be an existential threat to the game because at least right now technology cannot provide a solution.

Where does it end? I think the two likeliest endings are 1) the legal liability will become too great for even the vast revenues generated by those games to overcome, or 2) a critical number of fans will conclude that they’re not willing to countenance widespread, permanent, potentially lethal brain damage among the players who entertain them. Which happens first, I don’t know.

But I still maintain the belief, or at least the hope, that America won’t continue to support the games at this level if it turns out that widespread premature death is indeed the routine cost.

Like this:

So the company where 29 miners died in April is suing the federal government, which doesn’t want it to use a particular type of scrubber because the scrubber is inadequate.

That takes some gall. But then, this is Massey Energy, the company run by Don Blankenship, who called mining safety rules “as silly as global warming.” They’ve got almost as much gall as they’ve got coal.

Hey, Don: You ain’t Goldman Sachs. You killed 29 men, and you’re going to go to prison for it. Scrub that, you son of a bitch — but I think you’ll find, as Lady Macbeth did, that the blood doesn’t wash out.

For months now, Jeb Bush has been listening as President Obama blasts his older brother’s administration for the battered economy, budget deficits and even the lax oversight of oil wells.

“It’s kind of like a kid coming to school saying, ‘The dog ate my homework,’ ” Mr. Bush, this state’s former governor, said over lunch last week at the Biltmore Hotel. “It’s childish. This is what children do until they mature. They don’t accept responsibility.”

In fact, instead of constantly bashing the 43rd president, Mr. Bush offered, perhaps Mr. Obama could learn something from him, especially when it comes to ignoring the Washington chatter. “This would break his heart, to get advice that applies some of the lessons of leadership my brother learned, because he apparently likes to act like he’s still campaigning, and he likes to blame George’s administration for everything,” Mr. Bush said, dangling a ketchup-soaked French fry. “But he really seems like he’s getting caught up in what people are writing about him.”

Jesus wept. I don’t know whether Jeb Bush actually thinks Dubya did nothing wrong or if he’s just trying clean up the family name in advance of a run of his own. Or both.

I also don’t know what’s worse: that Jeb would say this crap, or that The New York Times would let him do it without challenging him, even though it’s factually inaccurate. Damn liberal media.

Like this:

A lot of people — some of them sincere but misguided, others of them plotting to shred the safety net and give the proceeds to the wealthiest 1% — are arguing that the deficit is the biggest problem we face.

It is, no kidding, a big problem. But in the near term, unemployment is a far bigger problem. And here’s a memo to politicians of both parties: Americans get that.

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Friday, June 25, 2010 8:44 pm

You don’t have to get all sappy and sentimental about marine mammals to be worried about this:

Sperm whales feeding even in the most remote reaches of Earth’s oceans have built up stunningly high levels of toxic and heavy metals, according to American scientists who say the findings spell danger not only for marine life but for the millions of humans who depend on seafood.

A report released Thursday noted high levels of cadmium, aluminum, chromium, lead, silver, mercury and titanium in tissue samples taken by dart gun from nearly 1,000 whales over five years. From polar areas to equatorial waters, the whales ingested pollutants that may have been produced by humans thousands of miles away, the researchers said.

“These contaminants, I think, are threatening the human food supply. They certainly are threatening the whales and the other animals that live in the ocean,” said biologist Roger Payne, founder and president of Ocean Alliance, the research and conservation group that produced the report.

The researchers found mercury as high as 16 parts per million in the whales. Fish high in mercury such as shark and swordfish — the types health experts warn children and pregnant women to avoid — typically have levels of about 1 part per million.

A lot of environmental skeptics have argued that the ocean is too big to pollute, and maybe it is. But apparently we don’t need to pollute the whole ocean, just the food chain that lives in it. And that we appear to have done to a fare-thee-well.

And if I understand this correctly, which I may not, the process appears to be irreversible. And if these contaminants affect whales the way they do humans, eventually the concentrations will build to the point at which they kill whales outright, if they don’t first disrupt reproduction by causing congenital defects that either affect fertility or outright kill the animals before they’re mature enough to reproduce:

Payne said sperm whales, which occupy the top of the food chain, absorb the contaminants and pass them on to the next generation when a female nurses her calf. “What she’s actually doing is dumping her lifetime accumulation of that fat-soluble stuff into her baby,” he said, and each generation passes on more to the next. … “I don’t see any future for whale species except extinction,” Payne said.

And this finding suggests a direct public health threat to many people:

Ultimately, he said, the contaminants could jeopardize seafood, a primary source of animal protein for 1 billion people. [Actually, as phrased, this assertion makes a bit of a leap without spelling out a connection. Yes, some people eat whale meat, but nowhere near 1 billion, and the number for whom whale meat is a staple is minuscule. So I’m guessing that what they’re saying is that fish that are a staple for humans are also being contaminated by some of the same sources that are contaminating whales, but the story doesn’t spell that out. — Lex]

“You could make a fairly tight argument to say that it is the single greatest health threat that has ever faced the human species. I suspect this will shorten lives, if it turns out that this is what’s going on,” he said.

And whether we can save ourselves or not, I’m skeptical that we can do anything about the whales. We have ways of treating heavy-metal poisoning in people, but I’m not aware of any facilities capable of applying the same treatments to whales. (Smaller ones such as orcas, maybe, but sperm whales? No. Besides which, would YOU want to be the one to tell a killer whale, “OK, hold still while we flush out your digestive tract with this activated-charcoal solution and/or polyethylene glycol mixed with electrolytes”?)

I am not a marine biologist, so I may be wrong (and certainly hope so), but I think the whales are goners. I just hope we can muster the will to do what needs to be done to save ourselves.

Six months ago almost to the day, Reggie Middleton posed a haunting question:

So, what does it mean if we get another significant [housing] downturn? Well, not only are the 2003 to 2007 vintage mortgages in trouble, but those 2008 and 2009 mortgages are at risk as well. What are the chances of this happening? Fairly significant. For all of those guys who swear we are on the brink of a booming economic recovery, recall that it was housing depreciation that set all of this off to begin with. It was not a dip in GDP, not unemployment, not a dip in corporate profits, definitely not a change in analyst’s earnings forecasts and not a crash in the stock market. It was a crash in housing. What happens if we get another housing crash (or more accurately put, the continuing of the current one) after a few hundred billion of stimulus and a 62% run in the S&P to guarantee that the stocks are nice and ripe in their overvaluations?

We’re about to find out.

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I don’t know who Jay B. is, other than that he’s one of several folks filling in for TBogg at the moment. But his characterization of Glenn Beck as a “moral vuvuzela” just immediately made him one of my favorite writers.

It is an indication of what a monumental screwup Harry Reid has been as Senate Majority Leader that his opponent, Sharron Angle, could be this batsh*t insane and still have a decent chance of unseating him:

The 16-page flier, available at TPMM, accuses gay people (aka “sodomites”, “perverts”) of everything from child molestation, to serial murder, to debasing rodeos, to contaminating the water supply by exuding HIV. Blood libel, or urine libel, as the case may be.

TPMM contacted Angle for comment, but received no reply from her campaign.

BP has publicly stated that the size of the reservoir under the blown-out well is 50 million barrels. In fact, says Tadeusz Patzek, the chairman of the department of petroleum and geosystems engineering at the University of Texas, “I would assume that 500 million barrels would be a more likely estimate. I don’t think you would be going after a 50-million-barrel reservoir so quickly. This is just simply not enough oil to go after.” So — surprise! — BP lied again.

Then there’s this: “Finally, the more oil and gas in the reservoir, the higher a priority the government may consider it to produce the well at all costs. See this and this.” So, yet more reason not to trust either BP or the government.

WMR’s sources on the Gulf coast report that BP Security personnel are being augmented by off-duty Alabama state troopers and G4S Wackenhut private security guards. The BP Security personnel ensure that no observers are present on Gulf coast beaches during night time hours when BP contractors scour the beaches and pick up and covertly dispose of dead dolphins, turtles, birds, and other sea animals that wash ashore covered with oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster.

BP is secretly disposing of the dead animals in order to avoid paying fines and compensation for killing endangered and protected species like turtles, dolphins, and brown pelicans. The sharp drop off in oxygen levels in the Gulf is forcing many sea animals into shallower waters in order to breathe, however, sharks are also following the easier prey into coastal rivers and inlets.

(I’m sorry, but from where I sit it’s a conflict of interest for Alabama law enforcement to be providing off-duty security for some of the same people they may later have to arrest.)

Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the US Army Corps of Engineers emergency planners are dealing with a prospective “dead zone” within a 200 mile radius from the Deepwater Horizon disaster datum in the Gulf.

A looming environmental and population displacement disaster is brewing in the Gulf. The oil dispersant used by BP, Corexit 9500, is seen by FEMA sources as mixing with evaporated water from the Gulf and absorbed by rain clouds producing toxic precipitation that threatens to continue killling marine and land animals, plant life, and humans within a 200-mile radius of the Deepwater Horizon disaster site in the Gulf.
Adding to the worries of FEMA and the Corps of Engineers is the large amounts of methane that are escaping from the cavernous grotto of oil underneath the Macondo drilling area of Gulf of Mexico.

On a recent visit to the Gulf coast, President Obama vowed that the Gulf coast will “return to normal.” However, federal officials dealing with the short- and long-term impact of the oil disaster report that the “dead zone” created by a combination of methane gas and Corexit toxic rain will force the evacuation and long-term abandonment of cities and towns within the 200-mile radius of the oil volcano.
Plans are being put in place for the mandatory evacuation of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Mandeville, Hammond, Houma, Belle Chase, Chalmette, Slidell, Biloxi, Gulfport, Pensacola, Hattiesburg, Mobile, Bay Minette, Fort Walton Beach, Panama City, Crestview, and Pascagoula.

The toxic rain from the Gulf is expected to poison fresh water reservoirs and lakes, streams, and rivers, which will also have a disastrous impact on agriculture and livestock, as well as drinking water, in the affected region.

Meanwhile, the commission looking at the causes of this disaster is being housed in the land of the blind: “From my review of their published bios, I cannot discern that any named member possesses any direct training or experience with the technology and practices of offshore drilling, a field that in its own way is every bit as complex as aviation, terrorism, or other past subjects of similar commissions.” By comparison, the commission that examined the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger “was packed to the rafters with figures of national prominence and deep expertise in aviation and space technology and operations.” That wasn’t the commission staff; that was the commission itself.

And, naturally, this will have bankster economic ramifications: Moody’s says that of all the collateralized synthetic obligations it has rated, BP stock figures in 117, or 18%. BP bankruptcy, should it happen, would create systemic financial problems. I’m reasonably sure this wouldn’t affect Blog on the Run readers directly — how many of you have a position in any CSO? — but I could be wrong.